CommentsXp
Best movie ever!
SanEat
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
Logan
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
GwydionMW
The book relies a lot on the claim the author intended to commit murder.All we know is that he killed no one.I find it suspicious.And the film leaves out a lot of the background.No real insights into Greek life.
ezkoulou
Isn't it strange that this movie was never screened in Greece? Greece where communists had lost the civil war and were hunted down like pests. It's all but a fairy-tale made by a man so that he may relieve himself from anger and sadness. Hollywood did a fine job transforming it to anti-communist propaganda. Technically a pretty decent movie.
gg-taxo
Whitewashing the victors of the Greek Civil War (Nazi collaborators, monarchists and all those traitors) is a direct insult to the Greek Resistance (primarily, but not only, Communists) who saved the Greek People from famine during occupation and shed their blood in the fight against the Germans and their local lackeys. While members of Nazi collaborating "security battalions" who were taking an oath to Hitler, not only went unpunished but were also reinstated and rearmed to fight against the Resistance the real heroes, the members of EAM-ELAS who bled to free the country were imprisoned, tortured and facing execution squads by the British-led monarcho- fascists. Really cheap propaganda. Total garbage, might as well have been financed by the CIA. Too bad I can't give 0 stars.
moviemaster
Perhaps the biggest problem with most of the reviews is that they take a partisan view of the Greek Civil War of the late '40s. The view presented sympathetically in the movie is that of the loyalists. But to call them the "Freedom Fighters", since they wanted the re-establishment of the monarchy seems peculiar for Americans. As for the book and movie "documenting" what happened, it presented one side and who could blame Gage for promoting his vision of the truth when the Communists killed his mother. But war is war- the complete breakdown of civilization. Quite often both sides do horrific things, just as happened in Iraq recently, where we are certainly far from being blameless. but don't wantonly kill as many as the "insurgents." Or another Civil War, Viet Nam where incidents such as Mi Lai were sign that we were not "saviors." The facts of the Greek Civil War are presented below, regarding the forced population of children: "In 1948, the two conflicting sides evacuated children and young persons from the territories they had conquered in the northwestern part of the country. The royalists transferred up to 30,000 children to the south of the country, and the communists sent about 25,000 children across the border to Yugoslavia where they were primarily accommodated in shelters in several Yugoslav republics. In the period afterwards, they were most frequently sent to the so-called countries with popular democracies – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, as well as in the Democratic Republic of Germany. Each of the conflicting parties accused the other that it deported these children against both their will and that of their parents, i.e. relatives. The two sides were also accusing each other that the other side was doing this in order to perform an ethno-national transformation – i.e. "to turn the Macedonians into Greeks" and vice versa. "http://www.newbalkanpolitics.org.mk/napis.asp?id=19&lang=English So take the movie for what it is. A presentation of one side...not necessary propaganda for right wingers or the tale of "freedom fighters." Rather the sad tale of a boy who lost his mother in a Civil War. Not a bad movie, but not brilliant.
